


Intro Level Romance

by princessofmind



Series: Would You Like Some Chemistry With Your History? [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 08:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/783990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessofmind/pseuds/princessofmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After that, he stops being CAPTOR S and actually becomes Sollux, even though you’re hesitant to venture to the back row again after the spectacle you made of yourself last time (okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but King George III was kind of a huge fuckin’ dick and it was funny, even though you shouldn’t be laughing at such things as a grad student).  And you probably would have written it off as one embarrassing moment where you failed to be the suave upperclassmen that you were, but it seems that you caught his attention with your pig impression that day.</p><p>Because he watches you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intro Level Romance

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel of sorts to my fic Crybaby, but both of them stand on their own just fine.

You didn’t really pay much attention to Sollux Captor at first.

You noticed him on the first day, though, of course. Sitting in the back row of the lecture hall, tucked against the wall with his beat-up ACER laptop open in front of him and an admirably disinterested look on his face even though class hadn’t even started yet, he was the kind of underclassmen that you were here to keep an eye on. You’re not quite thrilled to be in there either. TAing wasn’t exactly something you were looking forward to doing, but your graduate assistantship stipulated that your work was to do whatever your advisor needed, and while sometimes that meant compiling bibliographies for his book on early Puritan America or trekking endlessly back and forth to the library to ferret out articles on the same subject, it also means helping out with his fifty plus student intro level American History class. So while the presence of the laptop didn’t make CAPTOR S that much different from his peers, many of which had some kind of technology to take their notes on, the COMP SCI bullet pointed under his name on the attendance sheet on your desk made you furrow your brow and heave a huge sigh.

You really, really didn’t want to be that TA who stalks up and down the aisle in the middle of the tiered desks in the lecture hall, peering over shoulders to make sure people aren’t working on other assignments or dicking around on Facebook or Skyping with their boyfriends (it actually happened, there was a girl your junior year who got kicked out of your Japanese History class because she was video chatting with her boyfriend on the west coast during class time). But the sheer amount of laptops and netbooks and iPads were overwhelming, and even though all you wanted to do was plant your well-dressed ass in your desk at the front of the room while your advisor stood at the podium to your right, clicking through slides with a droning voice so soothing Morgan Freeman would be jealous, it appeared that you’d be doing more than just distributing handouts and collecting homework and explaining assignments.

It’s definitely not a perfect system, because as soon as you stand up, you know every web browser in the room gets minimized, every chat window closed, and suddenly it’s all PowerPoint slides and Word Documents. They aren’t stupid, but you aren’t either. It’s sort of like a military tactic; you never get up at the same time two days in a row, and some days you don’t ever get up at all. The threat of being called out in front of the whole class, and the unpredictability of your screen checks, keeps most of them at least paying passive attention, more-so than they would were you not there. At least, you hope this is the case.

Maybe it’s lazy, but you rarely venture back to corner that CAPTOR S has tucked himself into. His head never looks up from the computer screen, but he hands in his assignments on time, and whenever you actually go back to the last row his screen is an innocent Word document from which you can identify key words from the lecture like “colonies” and “natives” and “the monarchy”, so you suspect that even if he’s not paying attention, he does a fantastic job of bullshiting, and bullshiting is just as valuable in academia as actual legitimate skill, so you let it slide.

But on this particular Monday he’s practically sagging against the scraped black plastic, eyes shut behind his grimy, greasy glasses, and while you don’t like teachers who call out students for dozing out in class (you’ve done it before too; despite your attitude to the contrary, you aren’t perfect), that’s kind of why you’re there. Earning your full ride scholarship by traipsing up the carpeted stairs of the lecture hall to kick the back of snoozing undergrad students to keep them from snoring and disturbing the whole class. So you actually venture back to the corner he tucks himself away in, and you’re pretty sure he’s already awake by the time you’re slipping behind the swivel chairs, but you’ve already come this far. But before you can chastise him, because this may be a large survey class, but you’re a TA and this is what they fuckin’ pay you for, so it’s just stupid to sleep here, you catch sight of the last line of text on the word document on his screen, succinctly reading: what the fuck was George 3’s problem????

You snort, loudly enough for him to twist in his swivel chair and raise his eyebrows. Although his glasses are smeared and dirty, you can still see his eyes well enough to see that they’re two different colors, like your mother’s Persian cat’s eyes, and you clap a hand to your mouth as if to draw back in the embarrassing amused noise you made to gain his attention. “Don’t sleep in class, or I’ll have to ask you to leave,” you mumble from behind the physical barrier, and he just grins, all crooked teeth and no shame and it makes you hurry back to your desk and wish that you had a partition of some sort to keep you blocked off from the rest of the class.

After that, he stops being CAPTOR S and actually becomes Sollux, even though you’re hesitant to venture to the back row again after the spectacle you made of yourself last time (okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but King George III was kind of a huge fuckin’ dick and it was funny, even though you shouldn’t be laughing at such things as a grad student). And you probably would have written it off as one embarrassing moment where you failed to be the suave upperclassmen that you were, but it seems that you caught his attention with your pig impression that day.

Because he watches you.

And you’re hyper aware of it because you’d kind of started to watch him back, but you’re one of two people sitting at the front of the room, so it’s not...unusual for him to be watching you. But he’s one amongst a sea of faces, and with his eyes trained on you so intently, it would be painfully obvious if you were watching back, so you just let your eyes roam indiscriminately from student to student and try not to linger when you confirm that, yes, those blue-brown eyes are still focused on you. At first, it drove you absolutely up the fucking wall. Because you were pretty positive he was just waiting for you to fuck up again in some way, slip up and lose that professionalism you work so hard to exhibit, so you watch yourself and triple check every action before you perform it. You sit up straight at your desk, don’t fiddle with your papers, and take care not to stumble on the awkwardly spaced steps of the lecture hall when you perform your screen checks. You make sure not to clip your words and take pains to pronounce all the names correctly during roll call. You pointedly look anywhere but him when he walks past your desk on the way out, but that action alone seems to amuse him, because his shoulders shake a little in your peripheral like he’s laughing at you.

But eventually, you get sick of being worried about what exactly he’s watching you for. Aside from his laughing at your, admittedly childish, refusal to meet his eyes, he doesn’t make fun of you or make a point to antagonize you like some of the football scholarship kids do. So you let the weight of his gaze settle comfortably around you like a favorite quilt, watching how you chew on your pen caps and sneak articles from your other classes under the notes you follow along for the class that day. You feel him watch how you constantly rake your bangs back out of your face only to have the loose strands curl at your forehead despite your best intentions, how you stand in front of your desk and lean your hip against the hard wooden surface as you explain an assignment or point from the day’s lecture to the sorority girls or bright budding history majors when they stop on their way out of the room. You pretend not to notice how he smiles when your voice raises and your words start to run together when some stupid freshman asks a question you literally just fucking answered, and you definitely don’t notice how his skin is almost as white as the papers he hands you, long fingers, keyboardist fingers, obscuring black ink that forms surprisingly well thought-out arguments for a computer science major stuck in American History Survey I.

He doesn’t do as much during class as you do, but when he’s doing quizzes or bookwork, you’re free to watch him back. It’s difficult since he’s in the back of the room, but the row in front of him is empty against the wall, so when his laptop is closed and his long, skinny form is hunched over his work, you can see well enough. You figure out how his glasses get so fucking filthy the first time you see him peering at a scantron and he just pushes the frames up on his forehead, trapping the uneven fringe of his bangs under the black plastic and making it stick out every which way like he’s some sort of porcupine. He bites his nails like a maniac, and you’re pretty sure he only owns one pair of jeans, but damn if those jeans don’t hug his hips in the most perfect way, and you don’t blame yourself at all for watching whenever he files out of the classroom. His handwriting is absolute shit, and grading his papers is a nightmare, and while it annoys the shit out of you, it’s also the tiniest bit endearing. Of course the computer programmer can’t hold his pencil right and his letters look like some long-forgotten archaic language.

Finals fills you with a kind of dread that’s completely foreign to you. Aside from those dozen careless words at the beginning of the semester, you didn’t speak to him at all. But you’ve gotten used to him watching you, taking in how you talk with your hands when you have to take over the class when your advisor catches the flu and how the look on his face when he walks in changes depending on what you’re wearing (your favorite is when you wear your dark trouser jeans that make your ass look absolutely fantastic, he looks positively stricken and it’s wonderful). And now that the time that seemed so indefinite at the beginning of the semester is drawing to a close, you have no idea how to proceed. You stopped dating when you were a junior, too caught up in Phi Alpha Theta and taking as many classes as humanly possible to pad your academic resume to get into the truly stunning European History graduate program that your school boasts, so now you sit here as a first year grad student, dry mouthed over a goddamn sophomore who’s sitting in his corner in some video game hooded sweatshirt that absolutely swallows him and dark circles under his eyes. When he hands you the test packet and his scantron, his fingers linger against your hand, and it feels like there’s a cannonball in your throat. He smiles, just a quirk up at the corner of his lips, and when he walks away, you want to cry.

But because of this, all the looks, all the little things you learned about him, that he learned about you, you don’t freeze up when he slides into the booth next to you at the bar just on the outside of campus the weekend immediately following the last day of exams. He’s got those long, pale fingers, nails bitten down to the quick, wrapped around the neck of a bottle, and you send him a quizitive look over the rim of your glass. “Aren’t you a little young to be drinkin’?”

He grins easily, lazy, like you hadn’t just spent three fucking months circling each other, eyeing each other, with an entire classroom and the Revolutionary and Civil wars stretching between the two of you. “You got your undergrad here, so you know that no one in this town cards. Besides, I’m only a year off.”

His S’s are lisped, and it makes you think of how you waver on your W’s and clip your G’s. It would be painful to be an outsider listening to the two of you talk, but for some reason that just makes you want to smile smugly. “Point.” You drain the last of the amber liquid from your glass. “How did your exams go?”

Twirling the bottle between his palms, he looks at you over the rims of glasses that are cleaner than you’ve ever seen them, and he’s close enough to you on the cheap plastic that you can feel the warmth of his body through your sweater and his thin t-shirt. “Do you really care?”

You set the glass down, cocking your head in his direction. “I do,” you answer slowly, taking the bottle from him and setting it next to your glass. “But not right now.”

And it’s easy as anything. With so much buildup, a lifetime in school years, there’s no awkwardness, only the bubbling over of the want that’s settled heavy in your stomach since he whirled around in his swivel chair and grinned at you. He settles against you smoothly, fitting your bodies together as he presses you against the wall on the far side of the booth. You don’t know what to do with your arms or legs, the both of you have limbs for miles, but it doesn’t matter when he kisses you, tasting like cheap beer but so warm and wet and eager that it doesn’t offend your delicate sensibilities. He cups your face in his damp, chilly hands, tilts you just so, and you absolutely melt.

No, you didn’t pay much mind to Sollux Captor at first. But now he has your complete and undivided attention, and you don’t mind at all.


End file.
